I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website. I enjoyed browsing through sfw boards like /tg/ (tabletop media), /ck/ (cooking) and /fit/ (fitness). I had long discussions about the SW sequels on /tv/ back in 2015-19. The readership was surprisingly diverse and the anonymity lead users to provide more focused replies. With bodybuilding.com gone, the blue boards felt like the last bastion of the old internet.
> bodybuilding.com
Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online [0]. It’s so good, the Wikipedia entry [1] has a section devoted to it.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240123134202/https://forum.bod...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodybuilding.com
For the record this is an example of the "Fencepost error" where the last item in a range gets double counted as the first item in the next range and is incredibly common in dyscalculia (the math version of dyslexia) as people will have "visual number lines" in their head that cover ranges of numbers but the ends get double counted, so there will be a 10-20 number line then a 20-30 number line.
I suspect TheJosh had something like that with the week where he visualized it with Sundays at both ends but lacked the self awareness to realize that this was not a universal representation.
Can we pause and admire the sheer contagiousness of the debate? We are now extending it to the meta-realm, discussing the possible mental states that led to one or more of the original participants adopting certain lines of reasoning...
Speaking of the meta-realm, I've always wondered how messages in forum flamewars always seemed to gravitate toward a very specific pattern:
<personal insult>
<the point>
<bait to continue flaming>
You see this pattern all over the Internet. For example, from that bodybuilding.com thread:
There's a related, more polite version of "are you retarded" which is not uncommon even here on HN. It is "I'm confused". I don't know whether it's a phrase that I'm over analysing, but it always comes across as disingenuous to me.
The responder is never actually confused, they have a question that they should just ask.
Haha, I do the I'm confused, but that is:
1 me being polite and not calling you an idiot.
2 me hedging my bets in case I am the idiot.
Yeah I definitely do that too. I've never really thought about why I use that language, but thinking about it, it feels like a short hand and slightly politer way of saying
> I think you're wrong
> Here's why I think you're wrong
> Please correct me if I've misunderstood something
And I thought this is the pinnacle of being a well mannered netizen. It turns out you actually shouldn't even THINK of others as idiots?
The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
There's also "I'm retarded" or "Retard here".
Uh... I use "I'm confused" a lot. Because often I am confused! Someone said something that didn't make sense given what I know.
It divides fairly evenly (I think, being generous to myself here) between:
Yep, something I thought was true was not true.
Something they said was wrong, or they omitted something without which their meaning was ambiguous.
Maybe a smattering of "I/they misparsed what was said" too. But really. Often I'm just confused. When I use it I definitely don't mean they're an idiot I just worry that they'll think I'm an idiot... (...and that they might be right.)
The poster is likely confused at how anybody can be so r-slurred.
There is no better way to destroy the ability to communicate than by assuming there is evil lurking around every corner and all you have to do is uncover it!
Thinking that every conversation you have is high stakes, that the fate of the world hangs in the balance to be decided by your ability to conquer your conversational opponents, is a really insidious form of mind rot that is prevalent across the web and seems to know no ideological bounds.
Maybe it's just what happens when narcissists get online. The inability to acknowledge that the argument doesn't matter and so you can chill out and let retards be retards is fundamentally a failure in humility.
"I really don't understand why people would think X"
is another example but I think there may be some expression of non-understanding. "So retarted it doesnt make sense."
Similar, "are you a n*zi" never seen here but as a simple but clever "Could you elaborate?" often as a reply to a polite but ambiguous comment. It's basically bait for the ambiguous commenter to confirm or deny the morality of their comment.
"genuinely curious" is the new one I see everywhere lately.
"Genuinely curious" or "honest question" are the internet equivalent of "don't shoot, I'm coming out with my hands up". The disclaimer people feel the need to put so they don't catch a bullet for no good reason, when most internet forums are filled to the brim with trigger happy people with itchy fingers and immunity from consequences (barring a few reputation points).
Could be similar to "I'm not trying to be offensive but ${offensive statement}" Its a kind of disclaimer but more often found in speech than on websites.
I like playing with this sometimes by saying something like "I'm not trying to be racist but have you noticed that the weather is a bit cold today"... "that wasn't racist?!" ... "yes, I said it wasn't"
> "Genuinely curious" is the internet equivalent of a "don't shoot, I'm coming out with my hands up".
Ha, that's a great thought and I will doubtless quote (steal) it in the future.
Yes! Like "real question" it should be redundant.
The passive aggressive Gen Z version is “make it make sense” which I despise
Something I’ve noticed (and which is present among all people, but seems particularly common with younger people today) is a sort of unconsidered, unobserved sense of authority over social matters.
I know this was a thing when I was a kid, but something is different now. I watch my kids do it and part of me gets it, but another part of me wonders if it’s heavily influenced by something modern like social media.
It leads to this sort of attitude, like thinking you can tell people to make it make sense. It offloads a lot of cognitive burden onto others while assuming a position of authority.
I don’t want this to sound like “kids these days!”, because I don’t think it’s as simple as that. Perhaps it’s most obvious in kids because the attitude is most well-imprinted in them, but it’s absolutely present elsewhere in older people as well. Yet I didn’t see it so prevalent when I was younger.
It’s very common in political debates. Part of what exemplifies it best is a reluctance or outright refusal to do the mental labour of explaining one’s position on a matter. That is, without fail, someone else’s job. You’ve already got it figured out. It’s their fault that they don’t get it.
Like, you don’t get why Some Idea is correct and all Other Ideas are stupid? Your loss. Make it make sense.
I’m missing a lot here. Fundamentally it’s an unwillingness and a failure to actually engage, participate in having and defending ideas, and being accountable to held beliefs. I have to constantly tell my kids to own their beliefs and understand them, because they’re remarkably comfortable adopting and espousing ideas and beliefs without examination and intentionality.
I’m not claiming it’s a problem with youth though. I think it’s a problem with the dispersal and sheer density of information these days. People are overwhelmed. More than ever we go with vibes over actual considered interpretations of what we encounter. The default in the vibe based information economy is to assume a confident position and refuse to engage in good faith discussions, because you’re not even sure how you got where you are. People’s belief systems are like a social media Plinko machine.
I don’t mean that condescendingly. There’s so much information, so much to process, so many complex matters, etc. We’re all maxed out. Make it make sense.
Good post, and I believe indeed it is caused by social media and newer generations molded by it.
Go find some controversial discussion from 80-something years ago on Youtube, say, about homosexuality. Even as an older Millennial it feels the ability to entertain and politely discuss ideas we do not own nor approve of has completely disappeared. Now it’s literally just black and white, right or wrong, with or against us, with no nuance or possibility for one’s opinion to move towards compromise. It’s two camps making hateful memes about the other.
We are not made for this style of socialization and discourse, and no one is taking this problem seriously. It worries me a lot.
That's basically the opposite of /s - "I know it's hard to tell whether something is sarcasm or not through text, so I want to emphasise that I am not".
Of course, people will inevitably use it sarcastically.
Actually the brain is part of the body, so it doesn’t extend into the meta realm, the debate is still about dates and body building just with a different organ.
As the quip goes, there are two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.
That's three though.
That's the neat part.
Depends what you mean by the name "three"
or "neat"
Not if you start counting at zero!
0,1,2,3
That's 5
"Five is right out"
Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
The week starts and ends on zero
Whoosh
This has to be the most hilarious comment I've ever seen on HN.
Well, actually...
I'm not sure about the "fencepost error" part, but he's thinking of days as durations rather than points. It's early in the thread, about halfway down the first page:
> You don't start counting on sunday, it hasn't been a day yet, you don't start counting til monday. You can't count the day that it is, did you never take basic elementrary math?
Put in other terms, TheJosh uses "Sun - Sun" as inclusive start and exclusive end, while Justin-27 uses "Sun - Sat" as inclusive start and inclusive end.
I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive), so doubles down and comes up with weirder stuff later in the thread. I didn't read the whole thing though, stopped near the bottom of the first page.
>days as durations rather than points
Isn't thinking of day X as the range [midnight of X, X+1 midnight) isomoprhic to associating it with a point for X, at least for purposes of considering coverage (e.g. both approaches work to show that there are 7 days that cover a week).
Yes, see the end of my comment:
> I think TheJosh mixed things up when trying to explain it (durations vs inclusive/exclusive)
I wanted to keep going but pages 3 onwards don't seem to be archived. Argh, back to work I guess
Enjoy: https://youtube.com/watch?v=teC_uksSPBU
Maybe I have that. I can totally solve much more complicated problems but this fencepost shit just messes with. Recently I thought last quarter ended March 1st because a quarter has 3 months and March is the third month.
My personal favorite rendition of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqylqmDl0Mw (Mega64 - Flame War Theater - "Full Body Workout Every Other Day?")
I had to watch that at 2x to keep the thoughts-per-second above catatonic.
In the same vein, for those who haven't seen it, the classic "Is soup a drink?" debate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IDNuz_VFJtU
Somewhere, there are ancient Greek rhetoric teachers spinning in their graves.
Is cereal soup?
Yes. And a vanilla soy latte is a three bean soup.
No, that’s just an extra dressed salad.
Objection.
That was a treat, thank you.
Cultured gentlemen such as yourself may also appreciate:
>Intellectuals Solve Life's Big Mysteries | Big Brain by Tom and Don
[nsfw discussion] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcYzzS7PwG8
This is amazing, thank you.
> In 2015, Vice News contacted mathematician Joanna Nelson for a resolution, and she said that TheJosh would have to schedule his workouts in two-week chunks, claiming a week is seven days from Monday to Sunday.
Why was a mathematician necessary for this assertion?
Because if you ask an economist you'll get two answers, neither of which will be helpful.
If a woman ever asks what men’s locker room talk is like, just show them that post. We really are a simple bunch.
[flagged]
So basically it’s very gay?
I've never seen balls touch in a locker room so definitely not gay.
lol that was a bait thread, this is the same place that had a discussion on whether a pitbull could defeat the Sun if it snuck up on it at night
Do you have a link or reference to this? I'm going to be thinking about this for weeks now.
I found some fragmented search scraps earlier today which I saved.
The thread is possibly: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=170324391 (now defunct)
The link title was "Pitbull vs Sun, Pitbull wins because.... - Bodybuilding.com Forums"
The link text preview was "it just has to attack in the night time when the Sun is sleeping. amirite or is there a way for the Sun to win?"
Unfortunately this is not in archive.org or archive.is
I never saw this before. Thank you to share. Truly, this is peak Interwebs.
That IS dumb -- everyone knows there are 8 days in a week. Sunday to Sunday -- you can count it on your hands!
Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
Phewah. I feel like you just upgraded my entire life!
> Obligatory post about the dumbest argument to ever be had online
Jon Bois did an amazing video about this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eECjjLNAOd4
Laughing my head off reading through this. Thank you
I need to thank you for the web archive post. The argument was amusing as it was dumb.
I love this thread so much
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
Because it is the 2nd most active category, and the racist/alt-right beliefs have spread to the other boards because the head admin fires anyone that tries to moderate it.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
I discussed it somewhat recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42276865#42283887
All of this sentiment is many years out of date. "Alt-right" hasn't been a term of self-identification for almost a decade, and hasn't been used as an identifier by pretty much anyone for at least half of that. /pol/ is not the epicentre of the radical online right and has not been for years - it's a backwater in that regard now.
The most notable radicalisation happening on /pol/ nowadays, in my opinion, is a kind of hyper-masculine third-worldist ideology that is anti-semitic in its foundation and deeply misogynistic. While those two traits might sound superficially similar to the 2015 "Alt right", this new ideology has a significant pro-Islamist tendency, and has an almost comprehensive disdain for the west and its ways of life, in favour of authoritarian regimes like like Russia, Iran, and China. Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement, this faction of the online far-right is an increasingly post-racial one, with more traditionally white supremacist views disappearing, to be filled in by antisemitism.
Personally, I think this cultural political shift in the imageboard represents the increased representation of developing countries online, and is an important case study in how quickly cultural foundations can shift inside the borderless land of the internet.
I don't think it is out of date at all.
Anti-jewish content was there 10 years ago as well. The board is full of white supremacist posts when I checked yesterday with lots of threads complaining about non-white races. There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
Just because they changed their name to "groyper" doesn't mean they aren't alt-right anymore.
As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
I find it quite amusing that a site dedicated to celebrating Japanese culture is apparently 'full of white supremacist posts'.
> There's absolutely no indication that it has been overtaken by developing countries.
A lot of influencers in this space are non-whites born outside of the west. The scale of what he’s describing is exaggerated, but the trend is there.
> As for support for authoritarian regimes like russia, it is obvious that they are running propaganda on the website and want to sow division in the US by encouraging fringe groups like these.
This might have been true ten years ago. Most of the people in this space became disaffected with Putin after the war began owing to his moves with Dagestan and the Wagner group’s activities in Africa. /pol/ and /k/ are far more supportive of Ukraine than one would expect if your theory held true. There’s reason to suspect this is the result of the same kind of influence campaigns that were being run on the site by Russia during the Syrian Civil War.
> Also, as is being corroborated by other online circles like the Nick Fuentes "Groyper" movement
On 4chan, Nick Fuentes is loudly and routinely criticized as a closeted homosexual who hates women and encourages his impressionable underage followers to also hate women. He's a more active part of the incel pipeline than 4chan these days and is called out for it on 4chan.
(He's also as a federal informant, since he was never thrown in the slammer for plainly inciting J6 activity. The feds had him dead to rights for that and just let him. I mention this not because it's relevant to the point, just for completeness.)
I would still call it one of the epicenters. Yes, many venues that were previously only multlipliers like some prolific streamers / Youtubers / TikTok channels have grown and cultivated their own distinct subcommunities which form new epicenters.
However, from what I can see /pol/ still serves as significant breeding ground where people deeply committed to their views can get together in a "mask-off" manner without fear of moderation, while they have to be more "mask-on" on platforms that are more dissemination-focused like Youtube.
Look at some actual billboards in Arkansas where radio stations are describing themselves as "Alt-Right".
The fact that you had to explain this is evidence that those who try to fight the kind of ideology which is spreading on that website have no hope.
Name anything which doesn't need to be explained by somebody to someone. BTW, "you disagreeing with me is evidence that I am right" is a very 4chan way of arguing.
Interesting input, thanks for sharing!
> On top of that, they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Lurk moar.
I've been "lurking" on 4chan since it was 2 years old. I think that is more than enough time. Also not interested in conforming to group think on 4chan when the entire point of the place is no censorship.
> I've been "lurking" on 4chan since it was 2 years old.
This doesn’t establish credibility because you opened with dead memes from 8 years ago.
What dead meme did I open with?
I like /pol/ and although I'm not really interested in defending it (I 100% understand why people don't like it) I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
/pol/ isn't trying to be like the millions of other politic discussion forums online. It's literally intended to be politically outrageous so when people like yourself complain that it's full of outrageous alt-right content you're typically missing the point.
It's full of things that appear to be alt-right because stuff like racism, sexism and transphobia is extremely politically incorrect. While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.**
But even then I think it's wrong to say /pol/ is full of alt-right content to be honest. There are alt-right people there for sure, but huge amount of the political memes posted on /pol/ are mocking the alt-right and the right more broadly. The board is constantly roasting the MAGA movement, for example.
As a brit my favourite threads on /pol/ are the brit/pol/ threads which basically just post politically incorrect memes mocking Brits and joking about how shit the UK is. These threads largely just Brits shitposting with each other and it would be wrong to assume the existence of hateful anti-British content on /pol/ is somehow evidence that /pol/ is xenophobic against Brits. People should take a similar views of the racist/alt-right threads – the vast majority of people there are just trolling and being offensive for a laugh. You don't have to like the humour, but most of it is just people shit posting.
> they actively delete and ban posts that go against alt-right.
Loads of stuff gets removed... If you're posting content that "goes against the alt-right" you're probably taking the board way way to seriously and you probably should be banned.
** Interestingly another commenter in the thread asked about why there's so much interracial porn on /pol/ if it's so racist, which kinda highlights my point here. Just hating white people isn't politically incorrect – there's people doing that all over Reddit. To make hating white people offensive you basically have to incorporate racist stereotypes about about how whites are genetically inferrer to blacks in various way, but then in doing this you'll get viewed as racist and alt-right because you're using racial stereotypes about how blacks are more athletic, etc.
If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
There's little doubt in my mind that for every person on websites like /pol/ that's taking the piss with subversive "be as offensive/absurd to the status quo as you can" style of humor there's at least one other person that's internalized those kinds of views as a genuine belief system.
I don't browse 4chan anymore though I did used to (a lot) years ago. Take what I say as anecdotal evidence but I used to chat with a group of people I met through a former friend that seemed to start with a similar mindset to the one you have and then went down the pipeline over a few years of unironically espousing the most absurd abhorrent kind of thoughts you'd see on /pol/ and feeling 100% justified in doing so. They had gotten so used to seeing and interacting with such content day in and day out that it became normalized for them and they started to think that such a large forum existing with people saying similar things validated the way they began to think and act.
I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.
Essentially the plot of "Mother Night" by Kurt Vonnegut. An American spy sent to Germany before WW2 who works there as a radio host, but who ends up spreading even more anti-semitic messaging than Nazi members themselves. "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
> I think my main takeaway for sites like /pol/ is that you can't really pretend to act one way for humor for extended periods of time without it rubbing off on you in one way or another and that there are too many young people out there that stumble upon places like that and adopt those views since they lack the world experience yet to have formed their own.
As someone with an experience similar to this I think the route is more like:
You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to actually seriously discuss the issue with because its outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas), instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually shifts your views.
This effect is one of the reasons I think it's extremely important to have as wide an Overton Window as possible and proper serious safe spaces to talk about taboo things.
>You do the edgy trolling. You try to get better at being edgy by coming up with better and better arguments for the edgy thing. You start having doubts of "wait, this actually sounds like a good reason?". You have no one to actually seriously discuss the issue with because its outside the Overton Window (ostracisation or bans would be given in serious places if you entertained the ideas), instead you find only stupid strawman arguments. Years of not finding anything to beat those arguments gradually shifts your views.
How is this any worse than the feedback loop of extremism and purity spirals you see in upvote base communities?
It just seems like a different mechanism for the same thing. In both cases the overton window is moving somewhere stupid one witty and well received comment at a time.
[dead]
As confucius famously said, any community that gets its kicks out of pretending to be idiots will soon be filled with real idiots who think they are in good company.
A lot of it is ironic, but a lot less than it used to be.
That happened back in the 2000s. Now the arguments are about which wave of idiots media wants to present as the treat to all humanity.
> I will give my opinion of it because I think most people don't get it and take the board wayy too seriously.
I don't take the board seriously.
The posts I made that got deleted for being "off topic" were mocking the alt-right and I just wanted to get a reaction out of people rather than trying to sway anyone. I know I'm not going to convince anyone and I'm not trying to get anyone elected.
So when I see my posts get deleted or I even get banned for being "off topic" while a post on the same topic with an alt-right bent stays up with 300 replies,it's a clear indication that 4chan has a strong political bias and is absolutely not free speech anymore as most people seem to think it is.
[dead]
The intent of the posters may be ironic subversion. But for those reading? There's no doubt some portion that mistake it for sincerity and are quietly being radicalised by it all. Poe's Law and all that
I think I'd argue the issue here is a lack of diversity of views because exposure to radical views is the only thing that protects me from them. Although I might not be normal in that regard.
I would accept this is a problem though. I just question whether the solution is censoring views. I guess I'll give an example...
In the UK there's a lot of people questioning why young boys today seem to often hold such radical views about women. Of course, there's the surface level explanation we're given that boys are watching people like Andrew Tate online and are becoming radicalised, but then you have to ask why boys are watching people like Andrew Tate in the first place when they could also be listening to male feminists and have gone in the opposite direction.
It seems to me the most likely explanation for this content selection bias is that boys are told lies about gender from a very early age and then on hearing become easily radicalised partial truths from people like Tate. The uncomfortable reality is that Tate is telling half-truths about the biological differences and that many of these half-truths are just denied outright by others in positions of authority. It's really no wonder they find his content interesting. It's probably the same reason someone like Jordan Peterson seemed to fill a large cultural hole a few years back. Somehow just being positive about the unique contributions and strengths of men was a radical and shocking position that people found interesting.
I'm not here to argue that alt-right good or bad or more truthful than mainstream views.
I'm just here to say that 4chan seems to be censoring stuff that goes against it.
They've basically made it a safe space echo chamber for the alt-right.
100% facts. The fact that mainstream folks simply cannot understand how or why boys are in such a bad spot is exactly why 4chan was popular in the first place.
Sorry I wasn't talking about censorship. That's a different conversation
I'm just saying that whilst some people may be posting controversial content in jest, others will get the wrong end of the stick and take it seriously.
In addition there will also be people pretending to be ironic, but are actually posting their sincere extreme views. Like a reverse Poe's Law
> While far-left views might be equally reprehensible, these views are not seen as equally politically incorrect. It's actually quite hard to hold politically incorrect far-left views unless you incorporate some far-right views – being so pro-trans that you hate biological women or something stupid. This is why you tend to see less left-wing content there. It's hard to be offensive and left-wing.
Have you considered that what you think is radical left-wing is just centrist, and that you are acclimated to such right-wing views that it appears radical-left? In such a case, it is hard to be politically incorrect while saying something centrist.
> If you're up for it I challenge you to be politically incorrect from a left-wing perspective without it being possible to argue that it's actually far-right.
I think anything from these would qualify:
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/expansion-of-the-...
* https://alphahistory.com/russianrevolution/lenins-hanging-or...
Those are far left. And don't say that they don't count or are too extreme or whatever, when literal Nazi quotes are being used for the right wing. Comparing 'trans-rights' to far left which using Nazis as the example of far right is nonsense. The Nazis would literally have murdered trans people just like real leftists would have murdered you for being bourgeoisie.
Phrases like "eat the rich" and "liberals get the bullet too" are variations of what you've exemplified, but a common response to them is just a shrug. We saw a lot of this kind of sentiment publicly expressed after Brian Thompson's death, and I don't think anyone lost their job or got ostracized for celebrating his murder.
"you're typically missing the point."
You too buddy
Turns out there are many sorts of people on the internet.
[flagged]
interracial porn is frequently used by the alt-right racists to point out the evils of "race mixing" and to blame jews for being the producers of it. It is not an anti alt-right point at all.
Even if its posted by someone that is against the alt-right, it becomes a post to unify alt-right users.
It’s because they sexualize their fears. A lot of real fear of the BBC from scrawny white kids there.
Also why cuckolding, and other very embarrassing (for men) fetishes are popular there.
I unironically worry more about the degenerate fetishes that 4chan spreads more than the dumbass political ideologies they purport to have. Americans views of sexuality is so warped and sad because of mind viruses like this.
It's a kink because it's a taboo for them
You can still be attracted to someone even if you think you are genetically superior. Or you can get off on interracial power dynamics. Lots of reasons.
Go look of descendants of American slaves who do DNA tests only to find out they have European ancestry.
I'm sorry, what? The 4chan community is racially tolerant because they post porn of all varieties and not just a few?
Yes, they also love passing trans people.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/favela-trans-girl-saga
I think people also don't acknowledge how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there. When it breaches into Twitter (usually through funposters) people kind of ignore the unsavoury origin and rewrite the history. The anonymous nature kind of provides that petri dish of "if it's strong culture, it'll survive or be modified."
This absolutely was the case for a long time. It was the cultural center of the internet where nearly all memes sprang from or gained traction and context before leaving orbit for the greater internet.
That has not been the case for years though. I'd say it shifted to twitter as things shifted to inseparably political on almost all of 4chan maybe 6-8 years back and then shifted away from twitter a while after elon bought it and a lot of people started to bail. and I honestly don't know where exactly it's shifted to now, but I'd have to guess tiktok and similar new platforms.
But regardless I do think 4chan has lost nearly all of it's cultural influence, but still maintains it's notoriety.
I think it's less the case now, but 4chan is absolutely still the source of new slang. It's just less concentrated on that one platform these days.
People were using "Based" and Gigachad in the late 2010s for years before the mainstream picked it up in the 20s.
Also for indie video games, many do find their attention and early fanbases on /v/ before they spread out to twitter. Largely because /v/ is very information sensitive and will pick up primary news usually minutes after they arrive.
‘Slop’ was a 2024 Oxford Dictionary word-of-the-year candidate, and what most of the people using it probably don’t realise is that it originated on 4chan as an abbreviation of ‘goyslop’.
I think this was true at one point but not for the past 5-10 years. Based off of using the site I feel like now a lot of things start on other sites (particularly smaller accounts on twitter), get aggregated and popularized on 4chan, and then get picked up on other sites (often regurgitated back to twitter). Knowyourmeme shows this for a lot of things that people typically attribute as original to 4chan. There was definitely a time when a ton of stuff originated on 4chan but these days everything is so interconnected with the same people posting on twitter, reddit, and 4chan that I think 4chan gets a lot of unearned credit
Don't forget the slurs. They have some unique slurs in there that have backstories too.
> how much terminology, slang and other culture originate and spread there
Could you give some examples? The more unexpected, the better.
Preferably with sources, because tracing word origin is difficult enough on its own.
Wiktionary has a surprisingly robust list
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_4chan_slang
Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
> fren later came to prominence on sites such as 4chan and the subreddit /r/frenworld as a dog whistle used by far-right white nationalists and fascists to refer to each other
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/fren
Should be noted that they have a history of trying to co-opt neutral terms and symbols. Like the frog and the ok gesture.
Pepe the frog became associated with the online far right because it was a commonly used memetic avatar in general 4chan culture, and became intertwined with the space's shift to the political right in a fairly organic way. The association was boosted by (IIRC) the 2016 Clinton campaign's assertion that it was a far-right symbol, which was obviously embraced by those people as a sort of irreverent statement. Likewise, there may have been some very thin, actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture, but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community. To say these terms were "co-opted" isn't really correct.
I think there's actually a better case to be made that the pipeline of "co-option" (if you want to call it that) is stronger in the reverse direction. I posted a sister comment to yours about that.
>actually existing connection between the far right and the "ok" gesture but it really came about as an association that was imposed by the media and subsequently embraced by that community
There wasn't any connection. You are running things in reverse. There was an explicit concerted effort to 'take it over'. With celebrations when it succeeded as the media to the bait.
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You both are wrong, thee is actually a symbiosis. Media (any kind) need freaks, maniacs, disasters to generate views, and keep common people puzzled, thrilled, and entertained. Anons need lulz. Therefore complete nonsense — “white poodle is a secret way to say Heil Hitler to the ones in the know” — will be reported in hopes that it won't fizzle out, but will become the next media sensation, and immediately there will be threads from totally legit specialists discussing how to breed the whitest dog possible.
You are describing exactly what I said: the media makes up nonsense--or is fed it by activists--and then people think it is funny and play with the idea.
Why does that matter?
So you can have a clue who you're talking to.
because if you're trying to say a site was a positive influence, because it created a number of Nazi slurs and dog whistles... complete the sentence yourself
>Note, some of these are associated with the far right.
I think that should be trivially obvious based on the discussion at hand. What is interesting, though, is how so many of these terms came into public use as well-known, generic terms, despite the far right being poison to any normal person's reputation. Even many of the ones containing obviously offensive components have made it into wider use in some clipped form. Eg:
- based
- goyslop -> slop
- normalfag -> normie
I could be wrong but I don't think 'normie' came from 'normalfag'. I'm somewhat skeptical that 'goyslop' was the first use of 'slop' in this way too. And of course 'based' comes from rapper Lil B.
I think "normalfag" is a backformation from "normie"; at any rate, "normie" is itself 4chan slang that entered norm... ie... usage one way or another. "Based" was coined by Lil B but absolutely entered wide usage via being adopted as a meme by 4chan.
“Normie” is indeed used on 4chan but it didn’t originate there. Yes I agree that “based” was popularized by 4chan. Not so sure that “normie” was.
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Moot lists some examples in this video:
https://youtu.be/a_1UEAGCo30?si=JMVO5ox3K2AhxrMY&t=97
I thought culture was a “solved problem” now that we have AI.
I can’t keep up anymore.
Well either people thought my comment was to be taken literally, or they believe 4chan is culture and other hurting cultural gatherings like midsize live music venues were not.
It's interesting to note the popularity of the website, and the massive traffic it handled, despite the lack of everything we assume necessary for a modern (social media) website
- no modern web frameworks
- no microservices/kubernetes clusters
- no algorithmic curation/moderation/recommendation algoritmhs
One wonders just how much of the modern engineering developed in the past decades, that cost a fortune to develop and run is actually necessary or even beneficial for running a modern social media website
I worked for a major internet company until 2020. HN would be aghast how much "if we failed to provide this service a good chunk of the internet would either go down or sites wouldn't function properly and the stock market probably would dip" stuff runs on redundant pairs of LAMP stacks and other unsophisticated old stuff HN would turn up its nose at.
"Redundant pair of LAMP stacks"
Damn you got two of those? That's advanced magic
Active/Passive and no one has ever done a failover test.
We did a failover test last time a motherboard failed. It went so well it made the news.
Should have had updated dependencies though.
otoh the entire site is no longer running because they fell behind on updates
yeah but the 'social media needs hyper-complex and opaque curation algorithms to control what the users see, otherwise it'd become unusable' argument is provably false. Companies just want to control the narrative and/or push ads/influencers/opinions into peoples faces, while trying to maintain the illusion of organic discussion.
Nobody that is over 30 thinks any of those things are necessary because we all remember them not existing and websites handling plenty of traffic fine.
I think no algorithmic curation is its strength. It means that even if an echo chamber appears anybody can still post their opinion and it doesn't get downvoted into oblivion when people disagree.
I feel too many people who don't conflate /pol/ with the whole website, as well as the others, don't know why /pol/ was created.
It was eventually a replacement for the /new/ board, where news of the arab spring first started, shortly before it was shut down. However, it was plagued with proto-pol behavior before anyone was bothering to complain about pol.
There was always these 'cells' of non /jp/ shitposters, if they weren't the OG shitposters themselves, that would post about left-right politics ad nauseum, and in the most hallmark unproductive ways. It was when trolling evolved from 'clever this and that' to shear brute forcing. It was the topic of the news that attracted these unsavor political actors into that place, which was for a short period of time, a great diverse place for collecting news.
This social phenomena and history could never be repeated enough, particularly since we might be finally ending the story of pol/4chan - which was more popular than 4chan itself.
I feel too many people who conflate /pol/ with the whole website are just regurgitating information they heard from other social media sites. The most popular boards, by far, since 2020 have been the video game and vtuber boards. With Video Game generals being the most popular board for the past five years outside of the occasional political season. You can check this on 4stats.
People who still complain about /pol/ look a little like people who would still complain about ebaumsworld: Completely out of touch individuals who equate everything to a tiny phenomena.
For most of the period from 2020 to 2023, /pol/ has had more posts/day than any other board, often substantially more and it was 2nd most of the time. The /vt/ is a pretty distant 4th behind /v/.
I'm not entirely certain that I would call /pol/, which generates upwards of 110K posts/day a tiny phenomenon. It's about 13% of all 4chan posts. Add in /b/ and it's about a fifth.
And of course, casual bigotry is all over 4chan, not just /pol/.
https://4stats.io/
sorry buddy, but it's the nazi bar analogy. Let one nazi into your bar the whole bar is a nazi bar.
I don't care if some other sub-board is all sunshines and happiness, it's a nazi forum because of all the nazis that are coddled there.
That’s a silly thing to think about any site on the internet. Have you vetted every person on any site you post on? Or even this thread? If not, how do you expect a moderator to do that? This isn’t a pub, it’s a site used by tens of thousands of people.
Yes but if you go on /pol/ for an hour you are guaranteed to see nazi shit. I don't think they were saying that one nazi on the board means it's a nazi board, I think that part scales up when mapping the analogy to real life.
I mean, you could say the same about reddit or instagram depending on which people or subjects you follow on those platforms. They may have more moderation and checks to user identity but the problem is the same. This is coming from someone who quit using it altogether because of the 2016 elections: Trying to judge an anonymous platform with zero entry-level checks on what slips through isn't logical when that same standard suddenly doesn't apply when one puts the same logic on billion dollar companies who have all the moderation in the world and still can't clean their platforms up.
I don't post on sites that cater to nazis, if a website starts catering to nazis I stop visiting it. It's incredibly easy
What does 4chan do to "cater to nazis" that Hacker News doesn't? They both exist as discussion platforms, one just has less overall moderation.
That's fine, but I hope you don't also use Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc. while you say that. Or maybe even this site if the comments at the very bottom of this page are to be believed.
Wow you must have a HARROWING life trying to use the internet with that attitude. Have you just never heard of social media before? The other sites have a history of extremist groups all across the world posting pictures of murders to their platform, and you're probably okay using those.
I always thought it's /b/ that people conflate with the whole website… (for the purpose of declaring it a cesspool)
… but then again I never looked at /pol/, maybe it's even worse than /b/?
it is, and unfortunately from 2016 onwards it kind of outgrew the rest of the site like a tumorous growth until the whole site became markedly more neonazi and less goofy. something to do with donald trump i suspected
the fash trend on /pol/ died somewhere around 2018 and has shifted significantly radleft in the years since. This is misunderstood by outsiders largely because /pol/ users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
And despite things like shooting pharma executives in broad daylight being mainstream now, /pol/lacks rightly recognize that this is still edgy upon edgy upon edgy. And thus they meme the shit out of it.
>users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
I left in 2012ish, never really did /pol/, if it even existed then, but that 100% squares with my experience of the site.
edit: po vs pol
/po/ is paper craft and origami
Confusion between the two boards has been immortalized in this meme: https://i.redd.it/l8shi3nsfd531.png
> This is misunderstood by outsiders largely because /pol/ users don't actually hold these opinions, they just will represent whatever is the edgiest opinion at any given time.
There is no functional difference between the two, especially to the groups this behavior harms.
Stated harm is vastly overblown. Your average /pol/ack is too unmotivated to ever leave the house or even have an in person social interaction with a non-family member. It's a gathering place for the NEETs and hikkikomori of society. It's too unwelcoming to anyone with a functioning mental state and their activities live and die within that board.
You can't just peer into their world and judge them by the same standards as normal society.
If the mere existence of a place where people voice highly disagreeable opinions is an existential threat to you, then I think that says more about you.
I'm too red pilled off of post-irony to accept that argument anymore.
Their internal narrative and outward justification for their transitory position is irrelevant.
I've heard multiple times about a bit of lore that holds that 4chan once tried to brigade Stormfront, causing Stormfront to brigade back, and that was how the cross pollination occurred and started turning 4chan fascist.
No idea if this is true but it sounds plausible.
I think the much more likely explanation is that 4chan always existed as a genuine counterculture (which was particularly true in the age prior to the late 2010s, when the internet was like a completely different world to real life), and reflected the rejection and inversion of certain societal mores. The rise of a far right current in 4chan exactly mirrored the kind of progressive fundamentalism that emerged in the dominant culture from around 2013. The outer zeitgeist started to abandon a 30-50-year term of post-racial thought, and immutable characteristics like race and gender started to become meaningful as tangible social capital in a kind of "official" way, as ideas like the progressive stack filtered from online circles and Occupy Wall St, through academia, into the halls of power and governments. The emerging racial consciousness of places like 4chan were a direct (and predictable) reaction to that.
The reason that places like 4chan became a far-right haven and other areas of the internet didn't has nothing to do with whether people tried to raid Stormfront in the 2000s, but is purely a matter of the firm-handedness (or lack thereof) of their respective moderation. Prior to the 2010s, many less-moderated areas of the internet had a variety of political persuasions, but from 2015 to the present day, there is a very strong correlation between the prevailing political leaning of a space and that space's ideological moderation strength.
In its earliest years /b/ started prank calling the radio show of nazi Hal Turner, then messed with Stomfront as the conflict widened. There was little activist component to this. They just thought it was funny to rile up people who took themselves very seriously.
I don't think there was any real reverse colonisation. 4chan's userbase was always whimsically racist and A Wyatt Mann cartoons were everywhere long before the conflict. moot and WT Snacks implemented some interesting word filters that I can't repeat here without my post getting hidden. Everyone was hateful, but not full of hate.
I think very little has changed in twenty years really. Feral male behaviour is just arbitrarily right-coded now, when it wasn't during the Bush era. Most of the kids screaming bix nood probably voted Obama in 08. Politics is window dressing on timeless brand of petulant contrarianism.
If you're a parent, teacher, or intelligence officer worried about a "crisis of radicalisation", the worst thing you can do is take this stuff seriously. Just call your son gay until he grows out of it.
The edgelord thing goes back way further than 4chan and Something Awful. I remember plenty of racist fascist rapist satanic misanthropist kitten smasher edgelords from the BBS days. It was not serious, though sometimes it was I hate my dad and I just got the new NiN album serious.
At some point something did change though. It was around the same time as Gamergate and it’s been written about extensively. I’ve been into edgy hacker adjacent culture since like 1992 and when the “actual not ironic” stuff landed it was immediately recognizable as something unfamiliar and different. I’m still not sure how many people got “pilled” versus how much of it was some kind of weird collision with normie spaces where people didn’t get the culture.
There was a generational shift in there too. OG hacker culture was GenX and older millennials, the people who grew up with the net pre enshittification. The /pol stuff and GG seems like younger millennials and GenZ.
I am not pretending to have a clue and I don’t think anyone truly does. It’s all a very complex soup of memes and people and influences.
Good to know. My opinion of 4chan was formed 2010-ish, I guess I should, er, update it.
It is - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=/pol/&oldid=12855....
> I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
That's probably why a lot of websites use moderation to avoid having one section of it turn into a cesspit of every -ism you can imagine, up to and including fascism, because once you have a section of your website that is openly coordinating the pushing of fascism on society, everyone kinda forgets about the diverse and interesting other things it might have, because of the fascism.
4chan is more moderated than you'd imagine.
this might be conspirational thinking, but i don't think it's an accident that the site came out like this. yes, there's moderation, but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[1]. it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
that's not to say stringent moderation doesn't make a site less welcoming, though. it's about choosing what's the lesser evil to you, i guess.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-man-who-helped-turn-4cha...
> it feels like once that kind of stuff isn't punished, it starts to snowball a change in the attitudes of the site as a whole.
Considering the site has been around for over 20 years and people still call out and flame racism, I think this is an uncharitable and unfounded cynicism. I'm not sure declarative claims of 3rd order effects in a system so chaotic are capable of being accurate.
Multiple white supremacist mass shooters have been 4chan users.
4chan cheered on the Buffalo shooter who was live updating a 4chan thread during his murder spree: https://www.thetrace.org/newsletter/4chan-moderation-buffalo...
The christchurch shooter was a 4chan regular https://theconversation.com/christchurch-terrorist-discussed...
The whole "boogaloo" white nationalist/supremacist movement started on 4chan:
https://www.splcenter.org/resources/reports/mcinnes-molyneux...
Stop whitewashing 4chan's history.
And the Zizian murder cult sprang out of the bay area rationalist community and trans rights advocacy, what's your point?
You say this like the rationalist community and 4chan edgelords aren't two circles with an incredible amount of overlap.
> You say this like the rationalist community and 4chan edgelords aren't two circles with an incredible amount of overlap.
They are not.
Rationalists are the crowd that would attract typical Bay Area tech yuppies. Which is something that 4chan seems to despise with passion and makes merciless fun on.
Just go on /g/ (the technology board) and see any mentions of bay area, rationalists, or tech companies/startups. If you believe there is a significant overlap, then they surely are hiding it really well there by mercilessly mocking everything related to any of those topics.
I think people, whether they know it or not, rightly realize that race is too simplistic of a way to mark people as good/bad or whatever so even in communities that would be fine with racism it's gonna catch a lot of shit for simply not being a good way to accomplish its goal.
>but the moderators are explicitly told to go easy on moderating racism[
What would be gained if they didn't "go easy on racism"? Would we all start singing kumbayah and love each other, hippy-style? Or would people be just as racist even more remote corners of the internet/world, and then slightly-left-of-center-minded individuals could pretend that all the world's problems were solved and it could continue for another 100 years?
Letting people with abhorrent beliefs assemble with one another and commiserate on the awful things they believe... I mean I don't think I'd go so far as to say it's responsible for our current historical moment, but it certainly isn't helping it. The primary disadvantage of believing terrible, anti-social things is you would be ejected from social groups, be them communal or familial. That's not to say that racism didn't exist before the internet of course, it absolutely did; but racism and sexism were both on society scale improving over time, because those beliefs would cost you: they would cost you spouses, they would cost you children, they would cost you friends, in extreme cases they would cost you jobs and potentially even open you up to legal trouble.
And it still does, but it's less effective, because various flavors of cretin now have online spaces where they can meet like-minded people and nurture those beliefs, and worse still, all of those spaces reward extremism as any social media site does: subtle, balanced views are not incentivized at all, and you get the most social attention for saying the most outrageous thing in the space. We all know this, like maybe you've never thought about it before, but I'd wager almost everyone on this board has had this experience over one thing or another, even benign nothing issues.
And all of that is before we even get to the subject of things like influencers peddling YouTube videos, TikToks, or whatever to amplify those beliefs for their own profit. Whether they "really believe" these things is irrelevant frankly; in either case, people who believe these things see people being paid to represent their (wrong) ideas which lends them legitimacy.
And now we just have little bespoke engines of radicalization humming away all over the internet in the little shadowy corners, whipping people up into a lather about whatever dumbass thing they googled way back about how they can't get a girlfriend or whatever, and there seem to be a lot of spree shootings now for some reason, totally disconnected I'm sure.
Like the problem with this Libertarian "as long as you're not hurting anyone" is that it leaves a wide open loophole in there about hurting yourself, and while in many cases hurting yourself doesn't lead to anyone being harmed apart from yourself, as I keep saying: No one is an island, if you harm yourself in certain ways, you are absolutely a risk to other people.
The totalizing idea that your beliefs and values get to be the ones guiding the moderation of every single conversation happening anywhere on the internet (and therefore, the world) is probably more authoritarian than 80% of the ideas informing people who post on /pol/.
I like that there can be wild places on the internet where people can pieces of shit. 4Chan had communist trolls, Jew-hating trolls, Zionist-trolls, pro-Christian trolls, anti-Christian pro-pagan trolls. It didn't foster any fascism in society. It was just a place where people could say mostly what they want.
That is what has saved Reddit. You cannot find society fascism coordination there because the mods are strong. If 4chan followed that model bronies might still be a thing.
/mpl/ still exists. Well, still existed until now.
Eh, they came in very late on that one and only on the absolute worst examples. It's still very prevalent.
/g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI, also where llama weights were first leaked
> /g/ was the origin of Chain of Thought for AI
Is this documented?
Gwern talked about it when GPT 4.5 came out, a ton of breakthroughs with image and text AI came from anons trying to optimize models for their waifus. That's basically the origin of chat models in general - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5...
/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.
You’re right but only if ignoring the last 5 years or so.
I discovered 4chan around 2008 as a kid, it was much less hostile back then. Even as an adult I used to go on /fit/ every now and then. It was useful and funny and even “wholesome” in its own special way.
But over the last few years, the entire site became /pol/, and other boards became unusable. Maybe once a year I will pop in and immediately regret it.
/fit/ and /mu/ were good to me in my late teens, and /ck/ is the reason I actually asked my roommate’s mom to show me cooking basics when I was in college!
/pol/ and /b/ were containment boards, up until they got so popular that everything else ended up being containment boards.
I still miss hanging out on /v/ and /fa/. When they split /vg/ out into its own board, the colour started to drain from my experience.
the blue boards did have some slow overlap with pol in my experience - they were more distinct before 2014 or so and by 2016 I barely recognized /tg/ culture.
I'm curious, why bodybuilding.com in particular? I think I've only heard of it once. I wonder if anyone on HN remembers stardestroyer.net or old weird tech forums?
I used to hang out at Head-Fi a lot in the early ‘00s. It’s a headphone and headphone accessories (amplifiers, DACs, etc.) forum, and people nerd out about building their own stuff. I recall writing a review on some obscure Chinese brand of sound card that people liked, because it happened to have a really good DAC for the rear output (it was a surround sound card, back when that was something interesting).
I gradually lost interest when they started heavily pushing commercial sponsors. I get it; sites aren’t free to host, and moderator time isn’t free / unlimited, but it’s still sad.
Sites are surprisingly cheap to run all things considered - I remember asking the owner of an fairly prominent aerospace enthusiast forum (one of the biggest on the internet) how much he spends on hosting - he told me he hosts on a Linux box on DigitalOcean that runs phpBB, and he spends about $50/month for the whole website - not a crazy amount even for a hobbyist.
Bodybuilding.com's misc board was essentially the same sort of raunchy teen hangout as /b/, sans the porn. It wasn't anything goes, but a lot did, and of course you were dealing with the kinds of meatheads (said lovingly) who would happen upon bb.com in the first place.
Funny you point to /pol/ and forget about /b/, that was the meat of 4chan in the late 2000's
Even /b/ was pretty good back in the day. Memes and inside jokes galore with almost no porn to be seen.
It's, funny enough, identical to people who conflate all of old 4chan with /b/. The current most popular boards are video game boards and have been since Covid hit. There's a site called 4stats which charts this, and shows how the end of Trump's presidency spelled the death knell of /pol/ dominating 4chan. Which, by comparison, was four years. It's been five years since then. It's kind of like how the golden age of /b/ was a shade over three years (2004-2007) but all of old 4chan is equated to the memes made in this prehistoric era.
/vg/ also had a pretty cool amateur game dev general thread (/agdg/). No one was making any hidden gems there, but it wasn't trash either. At any rate, I liked it.
Not hidden gems, no, but some of big titles originated from /agdg/, both Risk of Rain and VA-11 Hall-A started as progress posts in /agdg/ before hitting combined >1M sales.
I remember one user who made a really fun arcade flight simulator.
Ignore /b/ /pol/ and /r9k/ and most of the rest were good communities compared to the modern internet.
Reddit can't get close due to its voting system.
This. It's just a website (where anyone can post, quite rare in these overpoliticalized days).
> A Soyjak.Party users also shared a list of emails they claimed are associated with janitor and moderator accounts, including three .edu emails. Although some internet users claimed that the leaks included .gov emails associated with members of the moderation team, this remains unverified.
Like who cares?
The first llama torrents were posted on /g/ and for a long time it was the best place to go for information on local models.
It used to be a diverse place without much to tie all the boards and users together save for a shared commitment to counter-culture. Then GamerGate and Donald Trump happened. "Every board is /pol/" was one of the most frequent replies you would see for a while until all the halfway decent people left.
/g/ is where I and a lot of people learned about FOSS advocacy and now it's just gamer hardware and transphobia.
/g/ genuinely was one of the worst boards on the website, but there were a handful of lurkers who made good posts in some of the general threads. the site as a whole was still was a diverse place up until yesterday, with only a few boards being unusably bad, and it was getting increasingly better.
it's a bit sad really. zero-barrier to entry, no login gates, no accounts, and traffic was so high that it moved really fast. it was like a dive bar covered in grime. will be sad to see it go. none of the other imageboards still kicking are quite the same, most are even worse tbh.
I guess the thing that really changed is our tolerance for bad actors. As far as I'm concerned even a 99% signal-to-noise ratio is unacceptable if the 1% represents a contingent of determinedly obnoxious and hateful people, and 4chan was never anywhere close to 99% signal.
Nah, the board culture really did change in the last 7 years. In a past that's not too distant nobody was obsessed with trans folk. That's not to say there weren't vulgarities and unpleasantries, but there was definitely a substantial IQ drop somewhere around 2018 and 2019. I haven't seen the "Install Gentoo" meme in a while, the old board culture was basically replaced with cringe fringe zoomerisms.
ive always wondered, is there a way to use technology on a board style wesbite to enforce a higher quality culture? i toyed with the idea of requiring an org email similar to Blind except it could be a school email too, the hope being that after verification you are fully anon still just now with write privileges and that it would somehow lead to better quality discussions and engagements
Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Social network culture is a multipart problem:
Any system that creates the above will be successful.The rub is that the humans behind (1) are free agents, with little incentive to stick to the site once (2) fails.
Hence rapid Digg-style collapses from site owners who don't realize how tenuous their community quality is.
I would say that reddit quality has declined a huge amount, but people won't leave because there's a huge network effect. Nobody will join a reddit clone that is 95% functionally the same because there's nobody there. Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
As an example of why reddit is so bad now (aside from the obvious moderation issues) about 1-2 years ago, reddit added a block feature that stops you from replying to any comment the blocker made and even any comment somebody else made below them.
So pretending this is reddit, I could make this reply saying that you are wrong and then say you have no evidence for your claims. Then I could immediately block you, making it look like you have no response. You are also not allowed to edit any of your comments saying you got blocked or else it will shadow delete that comment.
I have personally witnessed this abuse 5 times in the past few months and I don't even use reddit that much.
Is there any evidence that most of Reddit is actually real people (paid shills and bots don't count)?
reddit may have shills and bots but even if they were 90% of the population, they still have way more users than anything like voat, saidit, etc...
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Every community that tried to migrate off reddit to a reddit clone has failed.
r/drama spun off their own site successfully, and I know of another community that did and is thriving using a fork of r/drama's server software (won't say which to keep the normies away)
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>Aka how Facebook originally launched (.edu-only)
Similarly, I've heard it said that Usenet should never have allowed non-.edu posts.
You forgot problem 4: You need to provide your VC ownership a profitable exit.
This plays off problem 3. Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
How this applies to 4chan is vague since 4chan isn't exactly a growth platform. Moot's VC ownership was his mom's credit card[0] and his exit was "panic selling to hiroyuki because Hollywood actors' lawyers are breathing down my neck". Hiroyuki himself is incredibly sketchy. As far as I can tell, he bought 4chan mainly because 2channel got rugpulled by his domain registrar[1], after 2channel also had a massive data breach. Funny how history repeats.
Anyway, imageboard ownership being a fractal mirror of the incestuous bullshit going on in big tech and far-right politics aside, once a social network or forum becomes big enough to be 'known', it tends to stick, because moving off those platforms is a collective action problem. So between you holding your friends mutually hostage and the drama from letting the dumbest idiots post on your site, you've created a powerfully addictive socialization substitute that can be manipulated to make people do whatever. Quality posters and value don't matter; in fact, once you're established you want the quality level to go down.
Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down. It'd be like if tomorrow Facebook said "we're not doing user posts anymore, we're just going to have a bunch of comment sections for videos from legacy media outfits". Everyone would leave immediately because there's no more mutual-hostage-taking by your friends.
[0] This is not to be confused with Canvas, a similar imageboard platform also started by Moot that lasted like a year.
[1] If you believe the guy who stole the domain, the data breach rendered 2channel unable to pay domain hosting fees. That being said, the guy who stole the domain is also the owner of 8chan and a huge QAnon nutter, if not Q himself, and stealing your client's website because they ran out of money is an extremely malicious move.
As far as anyone knows, hiroyuki got the money to buy 4chan from Good Smile Company. Yes, the people who made Nendoroids.
> Growth-focused social media platforms don't want to remove anything but the noisiest noise, because there's still a pair of monetizable eyeballs behind most sources of noise. In fact, if you can be particularly noisy, you generate drama, which makes the platform emotionally salient and thus stickier.
This depends if a platform is building for quality or quantity.
There are a number of things HN could do tomorrow that would substatially drive engagement, but lower quality.
Granted, VC funding requires growth-at-all-costs, which tends to remove quality as a long term option.
> Digg collapsed because they replaced the entire website with something completely different. They didn't fail to moderate the community, they just shut it down.
Eh, as someone on it at the time, Digg's userbase collapsed before the redesign.
This roughly tracks with my memory: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bzibi/c...
I remember the HD-DVD/Blu-ray encryption key episode especially being an 'Oh, you're a square, not one of the cool kids' community moment.
Time limit for a reply. If you could only reply once in a 20 minutes, that wouldn't hinder most thoughtful users, but for user that are quick to draw a reply it's a detterenr.
Autoadmit is a message board that required .edu to register and ended up with a pretty similar culture (though with an older userbase given the initial focus on law school admissions)
A community that only admits academics is pointless, and a community that only admits American academics is completely absurd.
Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays (at least in Western societies). Counter-culture is not always a good thing.
There is no counter-culture anymore, not really. Society is virtually balkanized.
> Let me be bold: transphobia is counter-culture nowadays
No it's not. It's as mainstream as you get. One of the two major parties ran explicitly on a platform of transphobia ("keep men out of women's bathroom", "your daughter is being beaten up in sports by a man"). You can't call it counter-culture anymore.
The USA is not the whole Western world.
And in most of the Western World the main culture accept trans people. They may differ on who can take pills at what age or if the state should pay for surgeries (is it cosmetic, is it vital) but people who'd beat up transgender people for who they are would be shunned.
If I watch or read modern cultural product, there are huge chances some character will be officially transgender or the theme will be present (shout-out to wildbow). That's being part of The Culture. So being against it means being against the culture. Culture changes over time thanks to people against the status quo (counter-culture). You may have been counter-culture in your youth but once your cause has been accepted you're not counter-culture anymore. You won: celebrate. A meme is how Rage Against the Machine has been Rage for the Machine for a long time already.
Now once you accept you're older, you won, you're for the current status quo you may feel some dread about two things: are you still relevant? (hence why many groups will always try to prove their fight is not won); and: what are parts of the status quo which the new generations of counter culture want to see change (and surely for a good reason). What's the "lobotomy for everyone" of our generation?
I think it's difficult to label "majority" culture when most things are split 50/50.
Counter-culture feels like it requires at least an 80/20 or so.
Transphobia has been a majority cultural view throughout every culture based on the Abrahamic religions and their strict patriarchal hierarchies. Even given that the nature of gender roles change over time, and concepts like "homosexuality", "heterosexuality" and "transgender" being modern inventions, transgressing those roles has almost always been taboo.
Memoryholing the four years of the Biden administration.
No, not really. The "groomer" panic took place during the Biden years, with plenty of states passing anti-trans legislation and banning pro-trans books from libraries. The Biden administration did not reverse the widespread cultural hatred, discrimination and violence against trans people in the US in any meaningful sense. And it's honestly weird that you would think it even could have, given where we are now politically.
It’s two different cultures, one of which is more dominant, or was during the Biden years. As always, only the dominant culture matters culturally.
The premise that during the Biden years transgender culture was the dominant culture in America is just plainly ridiculous, as is the implication that only transgender identity mattered, culturally, during those years. Again, these were the years when transphobia began to mainstream and become codified into legislation and "antiwoke" and "anti-DEI" culture. It was never dominant, it only just started to become visible enough to really piss people off (similar to gay culture in the 1980s.)
Not transgender culture but elite coastal liberal culture.
What would you call the political culture that has replaced it?
I wouldn’t say anything has replaced it yet, more that the Trump admin is trying to do so currently by removing a lot of programs, banning words, purging employees, etc. Whether that will be successful remains to be seen but coastal liberal culture is very dominant and I don’t see it being replaced any time soon. And I guess you could call the other culture conservative culture.
Probably correctly termed "counter-revolutionary", given the self-used terminology of its proponents. [0]
Historically ironic, given MAGA's ideological birth in the Tea Party movement.
[0] https://americanmind.org/salvo/trumps-smithsonian-counter-re...
I would argue MAGA is somewhat revolutionary from the neoliberal globalist two party consensus in the last 30-40 years. Coastal liberal culture and its components might see itself as revolutionary, woke and so on, but I see it as just a continuation of liberal culture. After all, wokism, or whatever the term is, very comfortably fits in elite coastal liberal culture and that culture has been dominant for decades.
Joe Biden was saying he had the back of Trans people in his State of the Union Address, trans kids especially. His white House was holding Transgender day of visibility and tweeting about transgender issues His Department of Education Secretary was anything but transphobic
Yeah, after 2015 it became impossible to go to any of the boards if you weren’t a pol poster. They made it their mission to spread their vile shit everywhere.
Meh, /pol/ leaks but people also gets called out for it all the time. Overall I'd say containment style moderation like the one 4chan has works pretty well if you're looking to host "discussion" of a wide varity of topics.
It’s not a terrible theory. You could argue that other websites banning their containment communities caused a spillover effect into the wider internet as well.
Gamergate and Donald Trump was a 4-6 year period depending on where you put the needle. There were 10 years before it and now close to 5 years after it. The people who continue to hammer about it are just announcing that they don't understand the site and are complaining about ancient history. The most popular board right now is the video game generals board, and second place belongs to the regular video games board.
The site was markedly different before and after those events. /pol/ didn't exist before those events and aggressive alt-right rants didn't constantly leak into every other board from it (and get treated with kid gloves or be allowed by mods, who were specifically instructed to do so).
Frog in boiling water moment. Most of us have had enough experience with the platform before, during and after this period to know that it's not going back to what it was.
I still don't understand how to read threads. How do replies work? How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back? How is it organized visually??
> How do replies work
Reply references the post it is replying to by ID, most boards will turn that ID into a link or even create a UI to view a chain of replies.
> How do you know it's actually the person you're replying to who's replying back?
You shouldn't, an anonymous imageboard invites you to engage with ideas, not people. However, on most boards you can enter a password with your post, which is displayed as a hash, changing you from anonymous to pseudonymous (although this is generally considered attention-seeking and is frowned upon).
Thank you for explaining it.
If that's your thing, you can turn nicknames and avatars on in profile settings after registration.
The more popular blue boards were pretty bad too, let's be honest. It wasn't hard at all to find things on those boards that wouldn't be tolerated on any mainstream social media, for good reason.
What is the good reason?
Where I'm sat the only reason our three (?) social media companies restrict none illegal speech/content is to make it more appealing to advertisers.
I miss the internet before it was driven by advertisers and their investors.
I'm not looking for corporate sanitized social media site #102032. Imageboards if nothing else allow people to be people and you know what? Sure sometimes people suck, but I don't want some overvalued social media companies in America deciding what I can and can't see.
Sure I've encountered awful people on imageboards, but I've also encountered very nice, helpful people, some of which I've stayed in contact with long term.
Maybe today's social media. It's basically early xbox live tier banter. A relic of a different time on the internet that is incomprehensible to the outsiders who weren't around for it.
It wasn't hard to find things no, but the narrative one often reads is that it's the mainstream consensus there to the universal opinion rather than a fringe opinion which exists and isn't banned from having.
I feel too many people conflate /pol/ with the whole website.
I believe that's fair. Sure, it's "a different board" but it's just another URL on the same domain and same administrator, just different janitors. So it is really the part of the whole website. I know that 99% of people on 4chan disagree with me because they do not wish to be associated with /pol/ /b/ /gif/ but if they wanted to disassociate themselves with those boards then they should be on an entirely different domain without 4chan in name. polchan perhaps.
Do people also treat Reddit the same way?
They do not. Reddit is a big corporate social media site and largely gets a pass in online discourse despite the horrible communities that do and have existed there.
I don't know. I've never created an account there. In it's early days it just seemed like they were trying to make a platform that could be monetized some day so I never bothered. I assumed incorrectly that it would just fade away.
If that is the case that might explain why so many on 4chan feel that different URL's are different sites. Most of the current members seemed to have shown up from Reddit. Most of the original members grew up and left, myself excluded. I still visit from time to time but don't stick around long as most threads and posters are obviously just 4chan-GPT and people being tricked into replying to it.
There are certainly overlapping circles between Reddit, 4chan and HN. 4chan people talk about and make fun of members of this site all the time. They also make fun of Reddit but don't seem to call out specific people on it.
Piling on the "some parts of 4chan was good until it wasn't" theme: I really liked /ck/ for a while. Then there was this weird trend of just like "all food tubers are garbage" whether that was "Kenji-Cucks", or people hating on Rageusa, or what ever.
Combining that with the "post hands" request for a lot of food it was just an unpleasant community to participate it.
Weirdly trying to load the page right now I'm getting Connection timed out. Is hackernews ddosing 4chan? What a world.
Ragusea is an idiot, though and I arrived at that conclusion without any help from 4ch.
Why? He seems better than the average foodtuber.
You're talking to a well known troll, sadly
If he stuck to food it would be fine. But he can't talk about a cheese sandwich without detouring into racially polarized woke politics.
/ck/ from around 2015 to hmm… maybe 2018-19 was pretty good, and probably my home board. Decent cook along threads (I hope Patti is doing ok), /ck/ challenge threads where there was some theme we had to follow and posts would get ranked… and of course the yearly lemon pig [1] threads. Sadly I guess fast food posting, shitting on foodtubers, and general /pol/ shittery made it go down in my view. Still went there most days until yesterday though.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_pig